


Close the Book

by cordialcount



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: F/F, Gen, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 06:23:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12575668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cordialcount/pseuds/cordialcount
Summary: Abigail passed her hand through the titanium scaffolding of Alana's hip. "This wasn't about you," she said, very low.(Even the dead may introduce a new calling.)





	Close the Book

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rosecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosecake/gifts).



Abigail's arrival startled Alana as much by the boards' silence as by her being dead.

Alana had grown used to the nightingale floor outside the bedroom. Not that she thought it'd deter the only man besides the town tailor who had any reason to find them—but, she had reasoned to Margot, their mental security was as important as their physical. ("Whatever turns your crank," Margot had said, deliberate and dry. In self-fulfilling fashion, she coaxed the loudest chirps she could from it every time she sauntered to bed.)

Alana was picking at a monograph, judging each page for its anonymity. Her eyes lifted for a second of rest, and there it was, sitting in midair, all posture Margot would have admired.

"I didn't expect to come back for you," it said.

Alana stared at its face. The objets d'art Margot collected shone right through it, as did the sunlight, more faintly; but there were Abigail's guileless eyes, her painterly blocks of hair, her browbones unfanning from her glabella like wings. "This is a coping mechanism," Alana said, with Foucaldian purpose. She found her fingers taloned into her sleeves. "I didn't think myself so maladaptive."

It gently cocked its head. "You'll see, Alana," it said, and melted out of sight.

That night it reappeared at Alana's side, heels propped against the dish rack. By reflex Alana handed over a wet plate, and Abigail's teeth emerged through a split-lip smile as the plate smashed right through her. "You see?" she said. "You do believe me. Don't tell Will."

 

⋯

 

"I'm good at bait," Abigail said. She liked to cast her words into a calm, although—not a natural politician or psychiatrist—she tended to rush too many words per second for true gravitas. 

Around them the night carried on: the exuberant mating of crickets over the strains of Margot's equally atonal singing; the chandelier glitter of stars on the backyard pond, sectioned by wavemaking frogs. Dark forest, dark water. In the house Abigail's organic paleness gave her new form—ghost, PTSD symptom, memento mori, Alana had thought, in turns—a tint no richer than a cataract; here she took on saturation against a world perceivable without cones. "You don't move like bait, Alana. You act like a trap-and-release."

As Abigail swung her legs through the cattails, their stalks shuddered in and out of Alana's focus like fractal limbs. Never again would Alana step so easily through mud and stone, but at least Alana heard herself when she spoke. At least Alana drew breath. Once she would have merely spread her elbows or cocked a hip, soaking up space—but only her own space. The years with Margot and Morgan had revised her habits: her fingers instinctively dipped into Abigail's throat, suspended for a moment on that fine tense hollow before they swept through.

 

⋯

 

"You caught greater game than I did," Abigail said. "My dad wasn't into anything slippery. He liked them to stand still. It was of religious importance to him whether they thrashed or—resignation took them, so he wasn't being violent. It was slower. Like dimming a light." 

Alana could feel Abigail's eyes rolling, even presented with her back. "For Hannibal, the importance was only culinary."

"He was a predator. I think you're a lioness," Abigail said. "You have claws to protect." She turned. Her scarf slid off her shoulder and over her breast, underscoring her old wound with a cascade of silk.

Pre-defenestration Alana would have bought her something cotton and floral. This sort of guilt trip had been Abigail's bread and butter, right after the coquettish eyelashes and earnest staring that one could think a flirt, had Abigail not regarded the imminently (or already) dead as intensely as the living. 

Watching a ghost pluck at a vulnerability she no longer bore, a wave of regret overcame Alana, like blood. She hadn't given Abigail better tools. No surprise that Abigail wanted to talk Alana into the best way she knew—had been trained, in loco parentis—to protect herself.

"You've hunted him before," Abigail said. "Doesn't it get easier for you?"

 

⋯

 

"I lost the taste for philosophical debate when I lost forty percent of my blood," Abigail said. "I guess I deserved it. I died in his kitchen."

Alana hadn't courted her complacency, she thought; the human body is only capable of so much fear before the alarm surrenders its priority. Margot's pulse never outran hers when the wind slammed the eaves just so. Abigail didn't need to wind her up. Nonetheless, compulsively professional, she said, "You weren't murdered to balance the scales. You were murdered because Hannibal Lecter threw a bloody tantrum. He didn't even grant you the decency of making your death about you."

Abigail passed her hand through the titanium scaffolding of Alana's hip. "This wasn't about you," she said, very low.

"No," Alana said, meeting the hand with her own. "You didn't survive Hannibal that night. I did."

 

⋯

 

Alana had once loved Hannibal's punctuality; she was still grateful for it. Her charter had landed her four hundred yards from his house and the psychic pall of it hung over her regardless, the mullions of its Johnsonian glass as seemingly insubstantial as a rope line against a tide. Thank god she had not entertained a more personal approach for long. Five minutes and she'd be free, she thought. Either way this went.

Abigail had tucked her chin over Alana's shoulder. "I'd give you the gun if I could," Alana whispered. 

Alana hadn't, in hapless irony, understood their commonality until the night that killed Abigail: the defining shocks, the defining _person_ , that had rendered them immune to surprise in any lesser dose; the studied poise, which from Abigail's fingers in her pocket Alana knew was feigned as surely—and, almost within Hannibal's olfactory range, as shakily—as her own; the urge, after everything, to do good from the company of the diseased and dead. They were a strange subset of fairytale survivors, given not a second chance at life but a second promise of death. _The ending changes_ , Abigail had said, _you just have to kill him first_. Hannibal was the second man in Abigail's life who'd simultaneously venerated her and wanted to butcher her for parts. She deserved the death, but only the living could thin their own number.

"He's coming up the path," Abigail said. "Alone." She disengaged from Alana's back.

It was not the time to consider how Abigail could see what Alana could not. Alana hoped not to be sharing her senses anytime soon. Again she sighted the house-gate down her Remington.

The image blurred as Abigail stood, framed Alana's vision in her outline. "Abigail," Alana hissed, her voice taut beyond her control, but Abigail tossed a blade of dark hair behind her, and leaned in. Briefly Alana thought there was a weight on her forehead—Abigail's mouth soft between Alana's brows, grace to the victor, light as air and as desolating to part—and then her figure stepped aside. As if by the removal of a distorted glass Hannibal came into view, all but whistling in his daffodil suit.

Alana fired. Three shots: two not quick enough.


End file.
